WEED DEALINGS - SETTING STANDARDS

If you've been following my column on the Mishka blog, then you've probably seen some of the pot snob stuff I've addressed. There's white ash, hemp wicks, vaporizers, purple glass, no hands, and plenty of other stuff. I'm skeptical of these kinds of things. You see them in every industry. Remember when Air Jordans could make you fly? The same ludicrous claims are being made about marijuana products today. The difference is that in a clandestine industry, these novelties are the closest thing to standards most people know. This says a lot about how much we know about cannabis, and says even more about how regulation is being handled.

I can remember when kids actually debated—with the conviction of the fiercest believers; spit flying, veins popping—whether Air Maxes, Jordans, or Pumps would make you run faster or jump higher. Kids would have put their lives on the line to prove that the shoes actually did--or didn't--affect your capacity for the superhuman. I think as adults we tend to stay away from such fervent displays to appear measured in our beliefs, but the same passions still motivate them. So, it's not that patients don't want to have standards, standards have just never been an option before. Their medicine always just turned up magically. How the plant got there and what happened to it along the way were questions unasked in the interest of maintaining anonymity.

Because the production process is entirely obfuscated to the patients, patients no nothing about growers' standards and practices. Some people have started making efforts to standardize, but not much has happened yet. What we know is that patients want standards, the industry agrees that it needs standards to move forward, and many critics rightfully cite the lack of standards as a reason why the industry cannot and should not move forward. The problem is not that no one knows what the standards should be; labs are already testing for many of the appropriate substances, and many growers already abide by strict ethical standards. Instead, the problem is that labs are not testing comprehensively, growers remain anonymous and thus cannot be accountable, and the would-be regulatory agencies for marijuana are reluctant to issue any guidance. The marijuana industry will stall at this point until the it figures out how to show the rest of the country that it is indeed responsible, ethical, and capable. But I digress, slightly. Let's start by looking at the standards that do exist and how they came about.

The existing standards began in crossbreeding. Crossbreeding involves taking two different sets of genes to create a new, better set. In a way it's a means for bringing an imaginary thing into existence. Breeders cross the pollen and flowers of two phenotypes selected for specific traits. The children of these plants are then filtered according to their adherence to those traits. The process continues until, eventually, those traits have been pushed to dramatic extremes. As the traits emerge and can be reliably reproduced, their genetic information is spread either through flowers, seeds, or clones. At this point the breeder's checklist of standards has been fulfilled and their genetic "ideal" achieved.

For a long time, this process was carried out continuously by a small group of people. Based on their shared reports, this small group came to agree that particular plants possessed specific desirable characteristics. Breeders named new plants to reflect the lineage they came from, so each plant's name said something about its genealogy. By knowing a plant's family tree, you could also determine its degree of separation from other plants with ideal traits. In this way, plant names became a way of communicating standards. If you give a breeder a planet's genetics, they'll be able to tell you its lineage back to the landrace varietals. A single name is a genealogy when the right person is reading it. But, it goes even further because the breeding community is rather small: when a breeder knows the genetics of a plant, they also often know the breeders involved in its creation. For someone who has been a part of this private circle of production, a name is much more than just a name.

Marijuana breeders and growers form a close-knit community which is only able to function because it remains anonymous. Anonymity is key to making it in the old school world of full out drug war and all stakes prohibition. But, there's a contradiction: While the old school grower needed to be anonymous to the end user, in the new school world--with the whole country turning their attention to the legalization debate--the producer needs to be accountable. While ethical growers have standards within their circles, no one else is part of that circle. Most growers don't experience this disconnect though, and they want to, or need to, remain anonymous. But, that anonymity precludes them from adopting any industry standards. While some growers and breeders develop the basis for standards within their community, those standards are not adapted nor codified for the industry and consumers at large. Enter the testing lab.

With testing labs it's a different story. Labs are coming into existence to fill the standards voids. The role of the testing lab is to take the existing standards of growers and breeders and public concern, and to mediate between the two by extracting data from the flowers. Labs aren't creating standards, they're adapting them, and creating the ways to test for them.

Saying that there aren't standards for marijuana is incorrect, but until now those standards have been based on blind or near-blind trust. Relying on trust within a cottage industry—as diffuse as that industry may be geographically—is very different than relying on trust in a multi-billion dollar statewide industry. Laboratories quantify the threshold of trust. They splay the flowers out at a molecular level, turn their constituency into numbers, and determine how those numbers figure against a threshold. When you start getting numbers involved, things get adult, and this process is all about growing up. It's simply time to start treating the marijuana industry like the peg that it is, instead of trying to fit it into whatever hole we've been working.

The testing labs are the link between the private circle of breeders and growers, and the public circle of patients and consumers. Laboratories are the diplomatic agency tasked with determining how to quantify breeder standards for fidelity, how to translate guidelines for pesticides from other industries, how to measure the plants themselves, how to read the measurements from the plants, relate those readings to the guidelines, and how to determine what it all means. It's one part chemistry, one part statistics, one part anthropology, and one part botany. It's tricky territory, and it requires interacting with a great deal of people, groups, and agencies. There aren't clear guidelines, remember, because the labs are the ones making them.

So, what do they do? Who do they look to? What do they look for? Should they even bother? In answering and re-answering these questions the industry will be able to flesh out what is important to everyone, and ultimately that's what will guide the standards. This is a completely domestic market, from top to bottom. Everything that happens in this industry happens in our neighborhoods, our cities, our states, our country. That means that setting standards is not just about levels, numbers, or ideals. These standards are going to affect how people work, how people live, and what people think in the immediate and foreseeable future. No, it's not a simple task, but that doesn't mean it's impossible either. It just means that decisions have to be made carefully, and as we proceed, we must remain attentive. But, that's largely been the nature of this movement from its beginning.

Organic doesn't mean anything when it comes to cannabis. While some certainly have the most accurate and altruistic of intentions when they label their crop organic, it is simply impossible for any cannabis to be deemed organic. Organic is a term that the FDA uses to identify products regulated according to certain standards. These standards are enforced by third party agencies, none of which (as far as I know) operate in the medical marijuana industry. So, labeling something organic is irresponsible, and it's also a disservice. Do we need to just adopt some set of standards used by other people producing other things? Wouldn't we be better served by creating new standards and classifications? Ones tailored to the cultivation, processing, and ingestion methods common to the industry? Standards rooted in time-honored codes of the industry, rather than ones adopted from industries born of bygone eras? This is an opportunity to take power away from agencies disconnected from the world, and more importantly, from the people they employ.

ZACHARY G MOLDOF

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